How can you use a method intended to circumvent a need for proof in order to achieve belief, to achieve a lack of belief in something for which you lack belief because there's no reason to believe it?

This is incorrect, or at best, it's incomplete.

Give up the part that requires the same religious faith that religion does, the part that leads to certainty. Agnosticism is the thinking man's approach to religious skepticism.

Have you stopped always being wrong yet?

If you want to discuss something, don't ask loaded questions. If you want to argue a point, don't hide behind pretend questions. It is dishonest.

Other than that, you are wrong (I'm not going to bother pretending you actually asked something). You are implicitly arguing as if there isn't evidence for God's existence, which is wrong. However the nature and quality of evidence is up for debate, and a person can of course hypothetically reject it on nothing but faith.

I find it impossible that someone could not find examples of such disbelief in other venues of life, so I'll assume it is only the topic at hand that makes you balk.

Yes I am, but by suggesting that one would need faith, which is a is a belief unsupported by evidence, to deny the existence of god, you yourself are implicitly arguing that there is evidence for God's existence, which is equally wrong, by your standard.

Unlike gravity, which I would be hard pressed to deny both the existence of and the evidence that supports that claim of existence, the evidence for god is never anything but subjective interpretations of things observed or imagined, nothing that couldn't simply be described as wishful thinking, so faith is not required to deny it, I simply remain needing to be persuaded in the face of a lack of convincing evidence.

So, unless you can show that there is such convincing evidence that an act of faith would be required to deny it, it's my view that faith can't be used to achieve an atheistic outlook.



[irrelevant to the conversation stuff]

Yes, quite a very long time ago. Do you think that there will come a time when you stop making unhelpful personal comments in these conversations?

I was presenting the question and my objection in the same sentence having assumed I speaking to someone who would recognise that and not need to explain what a loaded question is and why I shouldn't do it.

[/irrelevant to the conversation stuff]

I have not argued nor suggested this. Please stop talking.

tame_deuces does not need to demonstrate that there is convincing evidence for God for it to be possible to leverage faith to achieve an atheistic worldview. Are you sure you want to stick with the comment I've boldened?

Thanks for that. A joking manner of putting it would something ala "If you can use faith to reject good evidence, you can probably use it to reject poor evidence as well". That isn't necessarily a comment on the nature of evidence for God, more a response to MB's assertions.

I also find it infuriating when people do as MB did and read "can", but then proceed to argue as if you wrote "must". It completely ruins debate and any hope of an intelligent discussion.

A: "There can be green cars".
B: "Why are you saying that cars are green?!"

Yep that's the thing bad thinking is bad thinking just because someone thinks their beliefs are evidence based it doesn't prevent them being wrong or having others share those beliefs having arrived at them via different faith based means.

I think the joking manner of putting it captures it pretty perfectly.

Oh i cant give up my certainty that idk what going on in this universe.

But as an atheist, you are expressing a certainty about the nature of the universe, and it's based on faith. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but it's not really different from religious faith.

Don't be so obtuse. As if your atheistic world-view is only limited to
"withholding from believing there is a God," as if there are no huge ramifications to that belief.

Id agree but i think you need to read what i wrote closer. The only thing im certain about is my uncertainty. Im a weak or agnostic atheist. Or just agnostic depending on definitions.

I'm sure I remember when you weren't so arrogant and rude. I could be confusing you with someone else though.

Whatever, have it your way.

I've been employing the definition that Faith is a belief when there is insufficient proof. Or, the flip side of that is a lack of belief achieved in the face of convincing evidence (such as Creationists denying ToE perhaps). Faith is a tool for extreme ends of the scale, for when there's some obstacle to belief/not belief, that needs some mental gymnastics to be overcome, not for when there might be some evidence, or might not. There's no ambiguity, no 'maybe/maybe not' about faith. If there's evidence, you simply don't need it. Or if there's a lack of evidence you equally don't need it. It's not the right tool if those obstacles don't exist and need to be overcome.

So, to need faith to achieve a lack of belief, you must believe that there is sufficient evidence to indicate the probable truth of that belief, or you wouldn't need faith to overcome that evidence. So what TD said is true, faith can be used to achieve lack of belief, but only when there#s some evidence making that lack of belief tricky to achieve. So if you want to be entirely logical about this then yes of course, it's possible to use faith to achieve a lack of belief in god (but that implies that the person using faith thinks that there is evidence), but interestingly, in a practical sense, i.e. what we actually observe in reality, this probably never happens, atheists simply think that there's no evidence.

Personally, I don't need faith to achieve lack of belief because I don't think that there is sufficient evidence to support the existence of god. I simply remain needing to be convinced.

Such as?

Faith can't be used to lack a belief. In other words, someone could have faith in the belief that there isn't a god but it doesn't make sense for someone to have faith in not believing there is a god.

What about atheists who believe there is no God?

Those atheists are relying on faith.

Which is where I am too.

That's a good question and I can see how you might say that they're using faith to achieve a belief that they can't know is right, but is it faith when they think that there's simply no evidence, no good reason why they would entertain that belief in the first place?

Do I need faith to believe that there isn't really a loch ness monster? It's something I'm sure about, and I don't think so, there's no evidence that there is a monster, and much of what people say they saw can easily be explained as other phenomena including the effects of well understood Cognitive biases.

When you write lengthy posts about how irrelevant my commentary is, and you start it off by paraphrasing something I have never said - don't expect niceties.

I'm an atheist, and I certainly think there is evidence for God. I would actually hold that an atheist (presumably one living in a relatively informed society) who thinks there is no evidence for God is either a crazy madman or an idiot. The quality of the evidence, however, is another issue entirely.

If one does as you do here, and simply discount available information as "not evidence", you are sawing off the branch you sit on. Any religious believer could just do the same. You are legitimizing people merely electing their beliefs rather than deriving them.

Ignorance is not a sound way towards knowledge.

Thanks my response to that point would have been much longer.

You are generalising from your own experience MB and failing to acknowledge that atheism like theism isn't homogeneous.

Also faith does not mean there is no evidence to support the claim, it may mean there is insufficient evidence to demonstrate the claims veracity and the gap is bridged by faith. I don't think your view on faith captures either the psychology or phenomenology of believing something.

Just to break down my objections a little

Proof is a success term, it either obtains or not, evidence is not, there can be evidence without it proving the claim it is supporting. So I am going to suggest that according to you faith supports a belief when there is insufficient evidence. Fine but this does not mean that faith does not or can not act as a supplement to evidence rather than instead of it.

tame_deuces has already responded to the final point, many atheists accept there is evidence for god but that it is insufficient to support the claim.

This ignores some of the differences in the beliefs of atheists. Consider the proposition;

P1 There is a God

As we've discussed before the weak atheist may just refuse to assent to the proposition, the strong atheist denies it hence assents to

P2 There is no God.

Asserting P2 is different from withholding on P1 and as a claim requires evidence, if we accept that there is insufficient evidence to support P2 how does the atheist get there?

Well now you're asserting things that I haven't done. The 'irrelevant' part was you asking if I'd stopped being wrong yet, I even separated it from the part of the post that was relevant to the conversation and used code brackets to make sure that this was clear.

Whatever, I'm not interested in personal engagements, I'm quite happy to discuss the topic with you.

Actually I do expect niceties anyway, even if I say that you've said something you haven't, there's simply no need to be so unpleasant, imagine what OrP would do. Just point out my mistake, politely, please.


Not at all, this is the crux of the issue. From my perspective, you have decided not to believe in something for which you think that there is evidence of it's existence. To borrow your terminology, I think this is crazy.

I'm not aware of any convincing evidence that any of mankind's gods actually exist. What is it that you consider worthy of the term 'evidence'?